This Day in Maritime History (The “Titanic” Survivor I Knew)

April 15, 1912—At approximately 2:20 a.m., having struck an iceberg less than three hours before, the Cunard luxury liner Titanic—a seeming monument to wealth, comfort and safety—sank to the bottom of the Atlantic on her maiden voyage, gaining a secure place as the most astonishing maritime disaster in history.

More than 1,500 passengers perished on the vessel widely regarded as unsinkable. Only 705 passengers survived, one of them being my grandaunt, Hannah Riordan Spollen—or as we all called her, “Aunt Han.” (Her 1924 passport photo appears here, courtesy of her grandniece, my cousin, Carol Anderson.)

Over the years, people from all walks of life recounted how they had just missed taking the voyage over on the doomed ship. One of the more famous, novelist Theodore Dreiser, was “anxious beforehand to see how it would be on a new boat like that.” But with money (as always, in those pre-American Tragedy years) a pressing issue, he decided to travel on a smaller ship with a less expensive ticket, the Kroonland, departing a day later.

Less famous—and decidedly more devout—than the womanizing atheist was my elementary school principal, Sister Eileen Patricia Walsh. At the time of the disaster, this Sister of Charity told classes at St. Cecilia Elementary School in Englewood, N.J., she had been a nine-year-old girl in Ireland, waiting to come over to America. Other circumstances interfered, however, and, like Dreiser, she took a different ship.

They shared precious little in common in terms of beliefs or life experiences, but both the 40-year-old novelist and the nine-year-old girl were left for the rest of their lives pondering the ways of fate.

It’s been my experience that proximity to disaster makes people garrulous. But it’s another matter entirely if you live directly through an experience that scars you for life. And that seems to have happened to my grandaunt Han, who refused to speak about her ensuing experience as a passenger on the ship for her remaining 70 years.

Hannah Riordan emigrated to the U.S., planning to stay with her married older sister, Nellie Riordan Lenihan, at 319 Lexington Avenue in New York City, until she could find a job as a domestic. Like most of the other Irish aboard the immense ocean liner, she was young, single, Roman Catholic, and from lower-class origins. She paid seven pounds and 15 shillings for her third-class ticket.

Han came to America with her cousin Patrick O’Connor and four friends from Kingwilliamstown, near Ballydesmond, County Cork. Adding to the excitement of starting a new life was their boat. None of the party suspected as they boarded at Queenstown that the Titanic would become synonymous with disaster.

In later years, not only would Aunt Han abruptly hang up on any journalist or historian writing about the disaster who had been enterprising enough to have tracked down her whereabouts, but her gentle gray eyes grew uncharacteristically frosty whenever even any beloved niece or nephew brought up the Titanic. Surely part of her reluctance stemmed from the traumas she witnessed or endured.

According to Senan Molony’s The Irish Aboard the Titanic, Han was probably not picked up until Lifeboat 13 came around to the liner at 1:40 am—the next-to-last lifeboat to rescue the survivors. This meant that for nearly two hours, she was stuck in steerage, where, because of the distance from the rescue boats, she had only a 50-50 chance of being saved.

From the Titanic, Patrick O’Connor called out to her party as it got into the lifeboat, "Goodbye girls – I'll see you in New York," but he went down with the Titanic.

It must have been awful for Han and her friends, along with the rest of the 64 passengers on Lifeboat 13, to watch as the great ship suddenly lurched beneath the waves, breaking in two (a fact denied by its surviving officers and shipbuilders before a British inquiry, but confirmed when the bow was discovered 1,970 feet from the stern on the ocean bottom in 1985), its remaining passengers screaming as they were engulfed by icy water or dived frantically from the wreck, the whole vast sea plunged into darkness as the bright lights of the boat dimmed all at once.

In New York, Han’s sisters Nellie and Julia were sure she had perished -- a newspaper report listing survivors mangled her name as "Anna Reibon," the result of a botched wireless transmission -- so they were astonished several days later when, after going to the pier to see the incoming rescue ship Carpathia, they caught sight of the shivering Han on her way off the boat.

Han's subsequent experience was more fortunate. Amazingly enough, twelve years after her perilous voyage, she journeyed across the Atlantic again to make a return visit to Ireland. She was naturalized as a U.S. citizen in 1928.

Han worked as a house maid for several New York families, most notably for an old-money family that split time between New York City and, when the mercury rose, Hyde Park—the Newbolds, the next-door neighbors and friends of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. (She brought FDR—by this time, crippled with polio—up in the elevator at Bellefield, which is now the National Park Service headquarters at FDR’s estate.)

Her full-time work life ended on St. Patrick’s Day 1936, when Han married Jack Spollen, a County Offaly native whom she met through his younger friend and co-worker at a New York hotel, her nephew Johnny Lenihan. By this time, it was too late for her to have children. Instead, she lavished her tight hugs and kisses on the five Lenihan children.

Except for a brief period in Utica, N.Y., after the wedding, Aunt Han and Uncle Jack lived the rest of their lives in the Bronx. Among their favorite pastimes was watching Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen’s “Life Is Worth Living” program in the 1950s. She died in September 1982, with Uncle Jack following her only seven months later.

When I knew Han as a youngster, County Cork cadences still graced her soft brogue. She wore glasses and a simple, heavy dress that stopped just short of the ankles. Her hair remained a rich ebony well into old age.

Han’s exact age remains a mystery: various vital records show variations up to nine years for her year of birth. But I would never think to ask her age, anymore than I would inquire what she had been thinking on the Titanic’s “night to remember.”